


Dismissal of innocence

by laughingpineapple



Category: Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective
Genre: Sad, What-If
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-17
Updated: 2012-10-17
Packaged: 2017-11-16 12:45:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,020
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/539568
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laughingpineapple/pseuds/laughingpineapple
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Once everything had been 'resolved', I had wanted you to give this to him.”<br/>“'Him'? You mean Inspector Cabanela, right?”<br/>“I don't suppose he'll ever forgive me.”<br/>Oh, but that would be the easy way out. (What-if where the execution is carried out but the rest of the revenge plan is somewhat delayed for some reason)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dismissal of innocence

**Author's Note:**

> As mentioned in the intro, this is set in a what-if scenario where Yomiel's plan took a slightly slower turn. He hasn't forgotten about Lynne or Cabanela, he's just on his own and taking his time.  
> And look, let's say that she saw him kind of break down at the funeral and they had A Talk about his motivations, I can't stand having her all distrustful on top of everything else.

He slowed down. The funeral march in his head never stopped – he adjusted his rhythm. Shifted back into first gear, then idle.

The motionless, silent corners of his flat spelled failure. _One day, I'll show him. One day, in a perfect parade. One day, I..._ Dream on, baby. Dream on. As five years of reality sank in the creases of his life, he folded up a little: he could feel the bone at the base of his neck aching, pulled down by the heavy void that filled his head.

 

“Inspector? Please? May I come in?”

“There is no need for that, Lynne... baby. Come in. Come in.” Some days, he just wanted to rip that title from his name and never hear it again. Mostly, he remembered that it wasn't half bad, what he had achieved, and that he still needed some way to make ends meet.

She stepped through the door, hair weighing like a question mark on her lowered head. There was this chair by the window, it used to be her favourite. She hastened toward it, tip-toeing to respect their long wake. Sitting on the edge of the chair, she pulled a wooden box out of her purse.

 

“He wanted me to give it to you.”

“He?”

“He”, Lynne repeated: the kind of 'he' that didn't need and couldn't afford to be specified.

Cabanela stood beside her, patted her back, eventually resolved to bow and sweep the box out of her hands.

“No need for that either”, she whispered.

Right. Sorry, Lynne. There was little need for anything, those days.

 

“It doesn't open.”

“I know.”

“What's inside?”

“I don't know.”

 

He realized, as he traced its corners with a finger in search of a hidden mechanism, that they were both looking at the item as if it were nothing short of sacred. A bit heavy, for a relic. A bit heavy for a saint, come to think of it. A bit late for jokes. He frowned at his own expectations, hoping for Lynne's sake that hers were less wild. He felt pulled back in a mirrored version of their lives as they were years prior to those useless days, as they were supposed to be – and finding himself on the wrong end of a puzzling item, for once. He couldn't help but like it, edge of the precipice or not: Inspector Cabanela didn't care for falls, he'd worry about getting back on his feet after that delusion was inevitably dispelled.

 

“He told me of your presents.”

He nodded. She had her logic, the young detective. They had their foolish, hopeful logic. They could crash together. “It has to be a hint.”

“But a hint for what, I wonder.”

Neither dared to spell their obvious answer out loud, 'for bringing him back'. From the dead. An impossible task, but then, they always were impossible men. So he sat on the armrest, resting on the chair's back and offering her a shoulder to lean on. Lynne remained still; he could see the corner of a forced smile on her lips, which was an improvement from no smile at all, but all the encouragement he could conjure up amounted to the two of them, at least, being still alive and he could think of many ways to say that much of an obviousness, but they all fell dry on his lips. So he went straight for the inapppropriate and bent over to hug her small frame, trying to make it feel important, at least, that they were still warm and breathing. Unstable and slouched on his perched seat, he ended up being the one supported by Lynne's grasp – all in all, though, it still felt as sad as a hug can be.

 

“We won't be getting nowhere by staring at it.”

“So what?”

“Lateral thinking, baby. Or something like it.”

“And what is something like lateral thinking, cheating?”

A weary wink.

“You figured it out? You have it?”

“I know him.”

Cabanela rubbed his temples and squinted, searching for proof of his hunch in the categorized mess of his memories and finding himself unable to single out a similar case, but since when had he fallen so low that his intution needed backing? And yes, he knew him. He jumped on his feet and twisted and forced the box's hinges until it sprang open, presenting it to Lynne with a bow worthy of the occasion (which is to say, not much, but he intended to honour her earlier attempt at smiling – besides, his agenda didn't include any smashing successes in the foreseeable future, so he cashed in on what he could).

 

A mysterious locked box with no lock, visible or otherwise, was just a lousy lid with a superiority complex after all. Or a presumed superiority complex. Just stuck, in the end. So, so him.

By the gods' mercy, he was almost kneeling already as he registered its content: the box hid an ornate gun, some centuries old by the looks of its silver carvings, unpolished for some five years judging by the state of the silver and the layer of dust.

An explosion boomed between his ears, followed by the soft _thump_ of his knees against the ground.

That wasn't just a gun. It was that gun. The framed gun by the entrance.

That blind spot in his picture, the missing detail in the corner of his eye at the scene of the crime. An old memory –

“ _And what are you planning to do with that, baby? Shoot someone?” “Do not tempt me.”_

– then silence, a still piece of the wall whose disappearance had quietly gone unnoticed.

 

Oh, he knew where to look. He'd known one of the last pieces of his puzzle for so long from the complementary shapes of all the neighbouring data, he knew all the borders and the niches and the corners, he knew how every inch fit. He saw the thin dark line of a burnt wire, the same that he'd seen on the floor trailing off to nowhere. He remembered the unlikely angle of the shot according to forensics. He saw Lynne watching him as her shortcut to answers, focused and strong, and he knew that the one thing he could not say was “Here's the final piece of evidence, baby, you sat on it for all the time he rotted and died in that godsforsaken prison.”

 

So he stared at the weapon, biting his tongue as the facts slipped beyond the bright web of thoughts that sparked in his mind, thin threads of connections bursting like fireworks, few of them logical, most of them true. They spun together pulsing cores of “In the wake of my failure”, “A present for today”, “It rested by her”, “A message or a statement”.

As they faded into the black of his mind, their trails spelled: point one, it was his goodbye. Point two, and an admission of guilt – of being guilty of lying about his innocence. Point three, too late to be of any use, willingly too late. A gift that only came too late was a gift to spite.

Oh yes, he could see where it was going, as his stomach tightened in a knot. His last message to him, no, his declaration that didn't allow replies, was closure. He could have been saved, he did not want to be saved and he ultimately made sure that Cabanela knew all about it. Cabanela who could see every link except from the one motive that started the chain, almost there in his conscious thoughts but blurred by the smokes and explosions.

_Jerk. That's a low blow._ To the point that he could feel its brunt – he was out of breath.

 

“I don't see the point of this.”

He shrugged.

“Don't ask me, baby. Did you say he wanted me to have it? I can see three dark jokes he might have had in mind with this, nothing more.” Or could he? Yes, he could. Two of which terrible, one in bad taste. Maybe a fourth. It may have been a hasty cover-up, but at least it wasn't a lie.

“Maybe he didn't want Kamila to inherit a gun.”

“You said it.”

“I... hoped it could be useful.” She did, he could read it all over her face. She put up a good stoic mask, his Lynne, good raw material best teachers, but she was still so young. They were going to crash together with their stupid hopes and he couldn't even catch her because he knew too much and couldn't tell.

“To what end? They left us. They all left us, baby.”

 

Give him five words to describe his partner and 'insensitive in all that matters' would be one of his first replies, conveniently five words long on its own so as to avoid uncomfortable alternatives. Such as 'dead'. Was he overthinking it? What had he expected, a tearful goodbye note from that man? But if he wanted to be hated, he could have hardly chosen a better way to go about it. It stank. And stung. And bred all sorts of meandering scorching thoughts that wouldn't stay still in a padded corner of his brain and messed with everything else.

Yes, he was angry, thank you, slowly but surely. As he erased every trace of his emotions from his features and posture, falling into a neutral slouch, he was angry in such a powerless way that made him want to grab his own head and smash it against a wall.

Angry at being lied to, angry at being ignored as an actual person with actual feelings that could actually maybe be hurt, angry at that one last prank he had no way of replying to.

He'd felt so empty until half an hour earlier and now anger filled the cracks with a numbness he could at least use to stiffen his neck and stop looking backwards: if he wanted to be hated, that gun was a smart move. Brilliant. Worthy of a master tactician and also worthy of the most comprehensive range of invectives he could evoke.

Yet the words didn't come.

 

“You know what, Lynne? It looks like all the innocents do around here is die.” He kicked the chair's leg. “Quick, do something terrible! We can't afford to lose you too.”

Lynne pondered the gravity of his words and forced a chuckle.

“On it! I have a good teacher.”

“Nothing but the beeest.”

“But what do we do now?”

An excellent question, to which he stood silent because, again, what could he ever hope to say. Lynne had to be shielded from even the smallest hint of that blasted gun's scope and throwing insults at her mentor and hero wouldn't really have helped her to cope. As much as it would have helped him.

As the first wave of rage subsided (first of a long high tide, he supposed, hoping the ripples wouldn't stain his coat) and Jowd's gambit became evident in its simplicity, it dawned on him that he had indeed asked to be hated. Point is, two can play a game of spite. Of course he'd ease his guilt by distancing himself. Had he found comfort in thinking that no-one would have missed him, that all ties were severed and he could go his merry way, burying what was left of their good memories under a pile of uncalled-for nastiness like a dog hides its bone and plays dumb?

Joke was on him.

 

_Did you believe I'd take the easy path? Hooonestly believed it? Easy is boring, you know that. Is this a challenge? It looks like a challenge._

 

And when Inspector Cabanela played, he played to win.

 

_See, old friend, your mistake was leaving me the last word on the matter. An amateurish oversight, you're getting rusty. Now come back and counter this, if you will._

 

“Same as usual, baby. You're here, I'm here, little Kamila needs all the support she'll get. There's little chance he'll ever reeeally leave. So we prove him innocent, what else? I haven't come this far for nothing, evidence... will show up. Some day.”

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> The thing with Cabanela and angst is, he doesn't give up *scratches head* This isn't the ending I'd planned, it was much more... passive, you know? (there's a reason I fancy myself more of a Jowd than a Cabanela?) But going through it from his POV made it end up here instead.   
> IT WAS ALSO WAY SHORTER, how is this longer than 'Chapter this is getting normal' 


End file.
